NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Blizzard once again claims World of Warcraft expansions will be coming faster
The MMO powerhouse that is World of Warcraft will be turning 11 years old soon, and the game seems to have finally started to run out of steam, with its subscriber numbers dropping to their lowest point in over a decade. Over the years, developer Blizzard Entertainment Inc has stated more than once that it would like to release new expansions for WoW more frequently, and now that its player base has continued to decline over the last year, the studio is once again trudging out that pledge.
“Legion is still speeding up our expansion release schedule quite a bit,” WoW Executive Producer J Allen Brack told Polygon in a recent interview. “We definitely want to continue to shrink that time.”
Legion is the next planned expansion for WoW, and it is currently set to release “on or before September 21.” During this year’s Blizzcon, the studio said that the expansion would release Summer 2016, which at the absolute earliest would be around a year and a half after the release of the previous expansion, Warlords of Draenor. While this would be marginally faster than the average space between WoW expansions (by a few months), it is hardly a revolutionary new pace for Blizzard, and that is only assuming that it releases literally the first day of Summer.
WoW’s shrinking subscriber base has been such a focus in conversations surrounding the game this year that last month Blizzard announced that it would no longer be sharing those numbers with the public. Brack downplayed the role of subscribers in the success of WoW.
“One of the problems that we have as a team and that I think the community has as well is this perception that there’s a direct relationship between the number that we announce and the health of that community, and the health of that business,” Brack explained. “That’s not really true. I wouldn’t say that World of Warcraft is necessarily half as successful now as in previous times.”
It is hard to believe that the game’s corporate overlords at Activision Blizzard Inc would agree with that sentiment.
Image courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment
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